The Indigenous Population

In 1500 Pedro Álvares Cabral's fleet, which was en route to India,
landed at Porto Seguro in what is now the state of Bahia. The territory
that comprises modern Brazil had a native population in the millions,
divided among hundreds of tribes and language groups. Their ancestors
had lived in this land for as long as 30,000 years. There is no way to
be certain of the exact size of the population or its distribution. Many
areas that were inhabited in 1500 were later stripped bare by epidemics
or slave hunters. But scholars have attempted to make estimates based on
contemporary reports and the supposed carrying capacity of the land. For
Brazil's Amazon Basin alone, demographer William M. Denevan has
suggested 3,625,000 people, with another 4,800,000 in other regions.
Other estimates place 5 million inhabitants in Amazônia alone. More
conservatively, British historian John Hemming estimated 2,431,000
people for Brazil as a whole. These figures are based on known tribes,
although many unknown ones probably died out in the devastating
epidemics of the colonial era.

Certainly, the indigenous population exceeded that of Portugal
itself. The early European chroniclers wrote of multitudes along the
coast and of dense populations in the Amazon Basin. Far from being awed
by the newcomers, the indigenous inhabitants displayed curiosity and
hospitality, a willingness to exchange goods, and a distinct ability at
aggressive defense. However, they could not prevent the devastation
caused by the diseases carried by the Europeans and Africans. Tens of
thousands succumbed to smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, typhoid,
dysentery, and influenza. Whole peoples were likely annihilated without
having had direct contact with Europeans as disease was carried along
the indigenous trade routes.

The Indians spoke languages that scholars have classified into four
families: the Gê speakers, originally spread along the coast and into
the central plateau and scrub lands; the Tupí speakers, who displaced
the Gê on the coast and hence were the first met by the Portuguese; the
Carib speakers in the north and in Amazônia, who were related distantly
to the people who gave their name to the Caribbean; the Arawak (or
Aruak) speakers in Amazônia, whose linguistic relatives ranged up
through Central America to Florida; and, according to sociologist Donald
Sawyer, the Nambicuara in northwestern Mato Grosso (see Language, ch.
2). These were not tribes but language families that comprised many
language groups. Numerous tribes also spoke languages unrelated to any
of the above. Warfare and migrations carried peoples from these
linguistic families to various parts of Brazil. The Europeans took
advantage of the cultural differences among the Indian peoples to pit
one against the other and to form alliances that provided auxiliary
troops in their colonial wars.

Portugal viewed the Indians as slave labor from the outset. When
Portugal began its imperial ventures, it had a population of about 1
million. Indeed, in the mid-sixteenth century Portugal's population was
so sparse that much of its territory was uncultivated and abandoned.
African and native Brazilian slaves were common on the streets of
Lisbon. Portugal's colonial economy in Brazil was based on slavery.
Initially, the Portuguese bartered with the natives to bring brazilwood
and other forest items to the coast. However, when the natives had
accumulated all the tools and pots that they needed, they showed a lack
of interest in continuing the arrangement. Consequently, the Portuguese
turned to violent persuasion. The enslavement of the natives shaped much
of the history that followed.

Just as Indian unrest had aided the Spanish conquerors of Mexico and
Peru, so too did the Portuguese profit from arriving at a time of
turmoil. The Tupí speakers had been shifting steadily from the south in
a massive migration to coastal areas, displacing the resident Gê
speakers, many of whom moved into the interior. This population shift
had triggered continuous warfare against non-Tupí peoples and against
Tupí subsets. It involved set battles that arrayed hundreds and, in
some reports, thousands of warriors in fierce hand-to-hand combat. Some
of the fighting went beyond struggles over control of land or resources
to vendettas in which captives were sought and in some cases reportedly
cannibalized. The Portuguese used these vendettas to keep the Indians
from uniting against them and subsequently to obtain slaves. The
conquest of Brazil was not a simple toppling of an organized empire as
in Peru, but a drawn out, complicated process that spread over huge
distances, different peoples, and centuries. Thus, it is not surprising
that the Brazilian elites developed myths about racial harmony, peaceful
change, and compromise that often have colored the interpretations of
historians, thereby distorting understanding of Brazil's past.

Just as Portugal was different from the rest of Europe, so too would
Brazil be different from the rest of the Americas. Portugal was both an
agrarian and a maritime monarchy that used its control over land grants
to discipline the nobility and its issuance of trading licenses to
attract local and foreign investment in its overseas ventures. As
merchant-king, the monarch supervised an economic system that imported
timber, sugar, and wine from Madeira and the Azores, gold from the
Guinea coast, spices from India, and dyewood and forest products, then
sugar, gold, gems, and hides from Brazil. These products were then
reexported to Europe.

The Portuguese established themselves on the Brazilian coast in their
drive to control Europe's trade with India and East Asia. They secured
"title" to what became eastern Brazil in their attempted
division of the world with Spain in the Treaty of Tordesillas (see
Glossary) of 1494. During the next centuries, the Portuguese, Spanish,
French, English, and Dutch changed the South American continent's trade
patterns, which previously had been focused internally. Seeking profits,
the Portuguese marshaled Indian labor to provide exportable products.
The commercial objective that initially had prompted overseas operations
became the first principle of Portuguese colonization. Brazil was not to
be a place where Europe's religious dissidents sought freedom of
conscience. Rather, to paraphrase historian Caio Prado Júnior, the
colonization of tropical Brazil would be "one vast commercial
enterprise." Colonial Brazil's reason for being was to supply
dyewood, sugar, tobacco, eventually gold and diamonds, cotton, coffee,
and later rubber for the European and then world markets. The externally
oriented colonial economy consisted of enclaves that faced seaward and
that considered only their own commercial interests.

In his 1843 essay, "How the History of Brazil Should Be
Written," Karl Friederich Philipp von Martius urged the study of
the three basic racial groups--indigenous peoples, Europeans, and
Africans--to obtain a clear understanding of the country's history. Yet
when he discussed the interactions between the Indians and the
Portuguese, he wrote that the former were only a few primitive tribes
and that the "colonies developed and expanded almost without caring
about these Indians." Although he could not have been more wrong,
historians have echoed his attitude repeatedly. The natives, rather than
being few, were in the millions, and the Portuguese determination to
exploit their labor shaped frontier expansion and set Brazil's modern
boundaries.